The Alexandre Pato conundrum

Alexandre Pato is still only 30 years old.

It is really not difficult to conjure an alternate timeline in which he has racked up hundreds of goals for a Champions League team and is gearing up for a fourth World Cup as Brazil’s No 9.

Instead, he is toiling away for São Paulo, his best run of form in the last decade having come not in Europe but in the Chinese Super League. He dreams of a return to Milan, but that possibility looks well beyond him now. He last played for his country seven years ago.

It is a dizzying contrast. And so the question persists: What on earth happened?

I tried to answer that question, with the help of James Horncastle, for The Athletic. 

The feud that overshadowed Brazil's greatest football song

Football and music have never collided as beautifully as they did in the song “Fio Maravilha”, Jorge Ben's nimble tribute to the Flamengo striker of the same name. I

t was the final cut on Side A of “Ben,” one of Jorge Ben’s most beloved albums. Almost 50 years later, it remains a staple of his live show, its sparkle undimmed.

Yet the story of Brazil’s greatest football song also contains its share of shade. It is a tale of opportunism and idiocy, of good intentions undone by bad judgment. It forced Jorge Ben, one of his country’s great lyricists, into a hasty rewrite and left a bitter taste in his mouth. It turned Fio Maravilha from a folk hero into a pariah.

Read my piece on the song and the story behind it on The Athletic. 

Sandro Orlandelli talked a doorman into letting him into Highbury. He became Arsenal’s South American scout

Sandro Orlandelli, who spent a decade as Arsenal’s man in South America and later reprised that role for Manchester United, is under no illusion that his path into top-level European football would be almost impossible to follow.

It is a tale of pluck and persistance, bad English and fuzzy logic, the cogs oiled by the goodwill of strangers. This might also be the only Premier League interview you read this month that references a night spent shivering in a central London shopfront.

Now technical coordinator at Red Bull Bragantino back in his homeland, Orlandelli laughs heartily as he tells the story of his big break. “Sometimes I couldn’t believe it was reality,” he says, and for good reason. If it had not actually happened, you would struggle to make it up.

Read my interview with him on The Athletic. 

Yaya Toure and Botafogo: a soap opera story that reveals much about Brazilian football's jumbled priorities

“Botafogo is no place for cowards,” said Ricardo Rotenberg, pointedly.

The flirtation between the club and Yaya Touré lasted three months, but that was the end of it. Touré had pledged his future to Vasco da Gama, then turned his back on them, too.

But the most interesting part of this twisted novela was not what it says about Touré's career choices, but what it says about the Brazilian game. (Spoiler: nothing good.)

Read my piece on the affair on The Athletic. 

Wellington Silva interview: Where it went wrong for Arsenal's best-ever Brazilian triallist

Those who work regularly at the Arsenal training ground see many young prospects come and go but few stick in the memory quite like Wellington Silva

Even after his first few training sessions, word began to spread through the club about the boy from Rio with the big smile and the silken touch. "He was, quite simply, the best triallist we’d ever seen," says one insider from that time.

But Wellington never appeared for the Arsenal first team. Arsenal did sign him permanently but work permit problems meant him spending several seasons out on loan, drastically impeding his development. “I have good memories I will always carry with me,” Wellington reflects. “Unfortunately, things didn’t quite turn out as I hoped.”

Read my interview with Wellington Silva – written up with the excellent Arsenal correspondent James McNicholas – on The Athletic.

Who should play up front for Brazil?

"He's the new Ronaldo," purred Daniel Alves. "He is going to be one of the greats."

High praise indeed, but Gabriel Jesus deserved it. For the first two years of Tite's Brazil stewardship, he looked the striker Brazil had been seeking for a decade.

Cut to 2020 and the picture is slightly less clear. Jesus, after some ups and downs, remains an important player, as well as a symbol of the Tite era. Yet he now has significant competition for the central striking berth, much of it from the same small patch of north-west England.

For now, Roberto Firmino is the incumbent, having ousted Jesus after the World Cup and impressed as Brazil won the Copa America last summer. Then there is Richarlison, who played up front for his country before doing so at Everton, and who is viewed by Tite as the most direct, physical option.

There are other alternatives – there is a growing lobby for Flamengo's Gabriel Barbosa, for instance – but the battle to lead the line for the Selecao at the next World Cup looks likely to have a distinct Premier League flavour.

Read the rest of this piece on The Athletic.

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Whatever happened to Adryan?

As a teenager, he was compared to Zico and tipped for superstardom.

But now, aged 25, former Flamengo forward Adryan finds himself at a rather lower altitude. After an up-and-down jaunt around Europe, he is back in Brazil – not at one of the country's big clubs, but in the second division.

What went wrong for him? Was it a question of talent or attitude? And did that 'new Zico' tag weigh heavily on his young shoulders?

Answers to those questions on more in a piece with Leeds United correspondent Phil Hay for The Athletic. Read it here. 

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